Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself

This is a fascinating story about how Winamp squandered its opportunity to be the dominant force in the music universe.

Great read, all the way through, but this bit amazed me:

Amazingly, given all the time elapsed, AOL still makes a decent amount of money on the site and on the program—while the company has declined to release official figures, former employees who worked on Winamp estimate its current revenue at around $6 million annually.

Wait, what? I find that astonishing.

This piece originally ran on June 24, 2012 (and Winamp finally called it quits in November 2013).

Ah, that explains it. Still, a great read.

9 thoughts on “Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself”

“This piece originally ran on June 24, 2012 (and Winamp finally called it quits in November 2013).”

LOL. Thanks, John. Added a bit to make that point. Appreciate your clueing me in. One day, will learn to read. ?

What always baffled me is that people seemed to like WinAmp’s atrocious UI, to the point of making other players look like it.

Note that the WinAmp webpage says they were acquired by “Radionomy” in 2014, and has builds as new as that year.

Which is … surprising.

They might’ve been the same people who thought the Nomad was elegant hardware.

Flush with cash, a confident Nullsoft had Lord and Frankel at its helm and oversaw the hiring of several post-acquisition employees, including Chamath Palihapitiya to work on product and business development. Seven years later, Palihapitiya went on to become a Facebook executive and part-owner of the Golden State Warriors. Last year, the New York Times lauded him as an “unconventional venture capitalist.”

Holy shit. How does somebody go from being a biz development hire at AOL to owning the Golden State Warriors in 7 years?

“‘We fought off the AOL bullshit as much as possible,” he says. When the company tried to insist that an AOL icon instantly appear on a user’s desktop during a Winamp installation, Frankel hit the roof. “I’d be like, look, our users don’t want to use AOL!” he says. “They think AOL sucks!”

Here’s the one thing he (founder of WinAMP) didn’t do — say NO to being bought out by the biggest soul-sucking crap tech company in existence at the time. He brought all this crap on himself, and is ultimately responsible for WinAMP’s demise. He should have known AOL wasn’t a fit and wouldnt want to do the things he wanted to do. Because theyre, you know, AOL. lol.

If WinAMP ever made any money at all, that makes it one of the most successful music players ever. The idea that you can say they failed in some way is absurd. The headline is some weird troll logic. You can’t say there is some alternate universe where WinAMP was even more successful so its money-making and popularity in this universe is somehow nullified. Classic headline link bait trolling.

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9 thoughts on “Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself”

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